At the Gate

by Martha Rhodes

Poetry. "A collection whose distinction rests in Rhodes cleaves to no fixed perspective-this is a single speaker, eccentric, various, rather than a spokesperson. This fluidity persuades because it mimics the dilemma, imitates and preserves the child's helplessly reactive mind as it survives into, and is masked by, adulthood. These short poems, by turns savage, wry , mordantly witty, tender, stern, deluded, sane, read like a series of fragments, bits of mosaic; they duplicate on the page the sense of a past's being, piece by piece, recovered; they convey, devastatingly, the moment of a pattern's the little scenes and vignettes, the suspect tools of memory, cohere heart-stoppingly and absolutely into a narrative which fuses the damaged body to the divided heart. The results of the forbidden saturate these poems; reading them we are in the presence of harm. and, simultaneously, a wild, stubborn, unkillable life"-Louise Gluck.

Genres: Poetry

57 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

About the author

Martha Rhodes has taught at Emerson College, New School University, and University of California at Irvine. She currently teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and the MFA Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. She has been a visiting or guest poet at many colleges and universities around the country and has taught at conferences such as the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, The Frost Place, Indiana University, Sarah Lawrence Summer Conference, and Third Coast. She serves on many publishing panels throughout each year at colleges, conferences and arts organizations, and is a regular guest editor at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference and the Colrain Manuscript Conference. She also teaches private weekly workshops. In 2010, she took over the directorship of the Frost Place Conference on Poetry in Franconia, NH. Rhodes is the director of Four Way Books, publishers of poetry and short fiction, located in New York City.

Reviews

[Mallory Pearson · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Show her you’ve discovered
all her holy spots

and watch her try to find another,
deeper forest. Everything she’s kept from you
is yours now: these frilly private things,
this tiny book of screams.”

[tegan · Rating 3 out of 5]

louise says read this and i say okay 🫡🫡

“back home, i’d rather not tell you where i’ve been.
quietly, i take off my coat.
i open a screen, lean out and wave.
does anyone drive slowly down our street
to stare up at our lace-lit windows?
i’m waving at parked cars, a grocery stand, the bus stop.
here we are. who out there
wants to be us?”

[LYS. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Oh, I’ve known since I was seven,
since then I’ve known I was him,
his.
—“His,” page 39

actually 3.75 stars (rounded up)!

louise glück is right. this poetry book is “the damaged body to the divided heart.” it’s strange to read this right after rereading natalie diaz’s WHEN MY BROTHER WAS AN AZTEC which is so chalkful of language that you practically choke on the imagery. rhodes’ AT THE GATE is markedly different in its simplicity. the speaker is the same to me regardless of the point of view of the poem, and no poem passes one page. rhodes’ style is laconic but in a gutting way; she really gets right to the meat of things, especially with the ends to her poem. i’m thinking specifically of “inside father’s pockets” and how the bulk of this fifteen-line, two-stanza poem, the last line/stanza is on its own:

[...] When he carried me to bed,
ordering me to sleep, I lifted for a kiss, my arms
around his neck and pulled him down
and pulled him down. He breathes,
You always want more, don’t you?

Don’t I.

like, what a fucking killer ending. a one-line stanza by itself. not a question, but a statement—an echo! the ambiguity of the tone is so fascinating to me as well, like i want to eat these lines whole. i will be turning this over and over in my head for sure. that being said, rhodes cuts her poetry book into three sections, with only the second having its own title—Orbits: A Sequence—and, personally, “orbits” is my favorite of the three which is where “inside father’s pockets” lives. other than the poems i’ve already mentioned, some of my standouts are “song,” “who knew,” “a small pain,” and “her future.” they all made me viscerally ill in some way. i am giving this a 3.75 rating though because of my emotional distance with the first section, and parts of the third. it didn’t ring with such intensity the way “orbits: a sequence” did, and it’s a bulk of the poetry book. ultimately, i do recommend reading it. fucking crazy shit happening in there (it is the incest).

all right, love n light, guys!

[Marne Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

These poems all have stories in them, but they are not narrative poems. The reader is forced to put the pieces together and figure out what each speaker is talking about. Usually I got there in the end, which means that they are doing their job. The other remarkable thing about these poems is the driving intensity and rhythm so many of them share.

[Claudia Putnam · Rating 5 out of 5]

First came upon Rhodes's work in the anthology The Extraordinary Tide, which I would highly recommend. Of course, Rhodes is the founding editor of Four Way Press.

This book is full of peril and close calls. I dog eared half of it.

Behind Me

I think he was behind me.
I think he wore a hat.
I think I ran inside a store
and asked if I could wait.

I think I called my husband.
I think he was asleep.
I know he didn't hear the phone
that rang till I gave up.

I think he was behind me.
I think he grabbed my arm.
I know a car door opened next
and then he disappeared.

I think I took a shower.
I think I saw a bruise.
I think my husband was asleep.
I think he wore a hat.